I made the website, promotional materials, credits and several props for Bas Devos' first feature film: violet. violet will premiere the 12th of February at the Film Festival of Berlin. Here's a short summary of the film:

A group of young BMX riders are confronted with the unexpected and violent death of Jonas, one of their friends. Being the only to have witnessed the incident, they all look at Jesse (15) for answers. His companions’ looks and his inability to answer their questions gradually isolate Jesse. The grief for the loss of his best friend and the growing feeling of loneliness stand in the way of Jesse’s search for comfort.

I wrote an essay together with Arne De Winde which has been published in "De nieuwe Duitse filosofie – Denkers en thema's voor de 21e eeuw" (Boom). Our contribution concerns the media philosophy of Sybille Krämer.

I have a part in Not from Canada: a play written by Kevin Doyle and performed by his theatre company Sponsored By Nobody. You're very welcome at Kultuurfaktorij Monty on the 26th or 27th of April. Doors open at 20:30.

Sunday 7th of April Onder De Titels will be presented at Tatjana Pieters in Ghent. This small book is a collection of news titles which appeared on the website of Dennis Tyfus from 29/04/06 till 28/03/13 published by Für Dich Verlag.

Working on a new word processor.
Word in Process sprung from a strong interest in the evolution of reading and writing technologies and practices and their relation to the spoken word. Throughout history, our relation to and dealings with text are characterized by a process of gradual internalization, passivation, visual isolation and de-physicalization. By creating an interface that allows for a more bodily and less visually fixated production and consumption of text, this project is an experiment in establishing a kind of literacy in which physical and mental activity relate more harmoniously through the use of voice, time, feet movement and keystroke pressure as forms of expression, much in the same way one would play the piano. Our writing and reading machines are not neutral devices but bear the marks of cultural values, conscious choices and varying interests. Word in Process is about reviewing and readdressing those values and choices in the hope to discover unexplored areas.
(More soon)

Speelplaats is a program in Werkplaats Typografie which was termed by former participants as "a kind of school within a school". A room in the school building with the same name served as a playground where "open-ended sessions were proposed, organized and realised by individuals and ad-hoc groups that created shared experiences with uncertain outcomes". Ines Cox and myself organized the program from february till june 2011. What follows are some thoughts on the program in particular, and on education in general.

Is it still worth asking what meaningful design education could be today? Does it make any sense in the current European climate of neo-liberalized education, where governments are taking up austerity measures and cut back heavily on social expenses? In some cases, the answer could be ‘yes’ but a reversal of the above might provide a more interesting question: is the contemporary design (or form) of education still meaningful?

The answer of field experts is affirmative. Indeed, PISA data and OECD statistics assure that the system works. Education, a technological process supervised by the school management, proves its usefulness as a tool for achieving preconceived goals. This process thus instills in students knowledge, values and attitudes essential to the entry into the contemporary order of things. Ultimately, the goal of education becomes the consolidation of Europe’s competitiveness in a global economy. In this context, the continual capitalist necessity of refutation, advancement and accumulation (in this case, of knowledge) defines the needs of the subject. Students thus turn into clients, attempting to solve jigsaws with puzzle pieces of information. In the meantime they construct, while walking, their individual, separate learning paths.

Is it possible today to provide education in another form? Is there an alternative to education as a process of addition or adaptation of exchangeable subjects in an existing knowledge society?

Maybe we could revive an old and worn principle. What if education would lead up to the constitution of a cultivated human being? Consequently, the goal wouldn’t be the adaptation to the existing order, but instead the formation of one’s inner self. Old Greek philosophers like Plato and Socrates already knew: acting and thinking can only be true when one shows that one’s actions are in accordance with what one thinks or says. This state of mind is also the goal of their educational ideal. Consequently, mastery here isn’t obtained by successful processing and correct utilization of informational knowledge-bits.

For Hannah Arendt human actions are initiatives, i.e. beginnings. Action and speech are based on plurality, which stands for both ‘equality’ (understanding each other) and ‘differentiation’ (becoming another ‘who’). The presence of others who can perceive what we perceive is therefore necessary. Put differently, we have to be able to hear and see what others say and do.

“With word and deed we insert ourselves into the human world, and this insertion is like a second birth, in which we confirm and take upon ourselves the naked fact of our original physical appearance. This insertion [...] springs from the beginning which came into the world when we were born and to which we respond by beginning something new on our own initiative.” (Arendt 1958: 176-177)

Thus our beginning in the world is dependent on the reactions of others, and vice versa. Arendt considers this complex reciprocity as characteristic of human action.

The conclusion of the above is that a possibly different form of education could result into a confrontation between, and a coming into the world of unique, singular individuals instead of the production of adaptable and flexible experts. This way of working needs to create spaces where the encounter with, and exposure to the other, is a possibility, because the unique and the new can only emerge under these conditions.
Speelplaats, which means playground in English, was an attempt to offer such a space, partly inspired by Jacques Rancière’s ‘The Ignorant Schoolmaster’. The prevailing notion that the transfer of knowledge (I.e. explaining) produces equality is radically contradicted in this famous book. For teachers aren’t really teaching, they’re constructing ‘the other’ as someone in need of (their) explanation. Alternatively, Rancière proposes that equality should be a practical assumption from which one speaks and acts. This is what he terms emancipation.

“Neither the teleological end of a political project nor a state of social liberation, the process of emancipation consists in the polemical verification of equality. Since this verification is necessarily intermittent and precarious, the logic of emancipation is in fact heterology, i.e. the introduction of a ‘proper-improper’ […]” (Rancière 2000 / 2007: 86)

So, in speelplaats, this ‘axiom of equality’ was applied within a particular research domain of a student and examined together with the group of participants. Thus collective efforts could bring insights for personal thesisses. Speelplaats was therefore an attempt to proof that disruptions of positions associated with situated statements of equality (individual acts of emancipation), could make it conceivable that new dimensions can originate where a kind of ‘we’ arises, that will teach ‘us’, and whereby the contours of that ‘we’ are always singular and provisional. New ways of perceiving or doing things (new beginnings of beginners) which were triggered by ‘assuming that a certain x = a certain y, and its consequential verification sought to encourage thought, experimentation and inventiveness.

This inherent unprovable principle provoked more than once local, temporary, singular and non-conformist acts which created a new, shadowy dimension inside the apparent natural order of things. The use of these foregoing tactics and the process of emancipation were applied to substitute a hierarchical, unequal and schoolish order for an educational form based on free will, initiative and singularity. This design tried to open up a space, a playground, where playing wasn’t understood as ‘gaming’, but as an act of practicing. The latter, termed ‘aksesis’ or ‘meditation’ by respectively the ancient Greeks and Foucault, isn’t an attempt to recognize one’s innermost feelings but should be understood as a thinking process whereby one verifies if what one does is in line with what one presupposes as the truth and with the ideas one has. The athlete who’s working on his condition is an analogy often used by the Greeks in this context. Isn’t this also what is considered, with a Greek term, a thesis? Developing, strengthening and tuning ones body of work?

Maybe Max Stirners conclusion in ‘The False Principle of Our Education’ can serve here as well. He states that ‘we’ can only educate ‘us’ when everybody becomes free men. Then the goal of education is no longer knowledge but the will born out of this knowledge. In other words, “knowledge itself must die in order to blossom forth again in death as will” (Stirner 1842 / 1984: 19). This is exactly what speelplaats sought to achieve; indeed one cannot learn to have a will, but one is likely to become inspired by human beings who are doing what they are willing to do, human beings who are prepared to take responsibility for that what makes the core of their personal concerns.

Arendt, H. (1958) The Human Condition. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

McGushin, E. F., (2007) Foucault’s askēsis: an introduction to the philosophical life. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

A trip to the Gemeentemuseum in Den Haag where the models for Constants’ city ‘New Babylon’ are on display, combined with a visit to a clandestine and very temporal movie house. The documentary ‘Constant, Avant le Départ’ was screened in an unfinished luxury penthouse ‘woningtype M’ on the 24th floor of the contemporary ‘New Babylon’ (the eye catcher of Uptown Den Haag, ‘outstanding in every detail’). After secretely entering the construction site, the ghost of Constant appeared on a wall facing a 1.507.000 euro panoramic view of the city.

A day long, the infrastructure of the Dutch railway system was used as school environment, based on Cedric Prices 1964 ‘Potteries Thinkbelt’ study. In his proposal the university was not a building, but a kind of circuit, or network, with mobile classrooms and laboratories using the existing rail lines to move from place to place. A literal illustration of what a school could and should be: minds in motion, travelling through a variety of thoughts and connecting them together.

Holland.com states that Cadzand is home to the longest piece of art in Europe. The work is 1099.71 meters in length and contains ‘Doric pillars and design street lights’, furthermore one’s experience of the work is akin to ‘walking on
the Acropolis’.

Little information, reviews or images of the artwork can be found, say for a similar description of the artwork stating it contains ‘neoclassical columns and light fittings’. Most bizarrely, a website for holiday home rentals in the local area declares that there are no ‘things to see’ in Cadzand. How can such a landmark, the longest piece of art in Europe be all but undiscovered?

A journey was thus made to Cadzand to find and experience the ‘Zeeland Acropolis’. Two plastic Doric columns were hauled throughout and deposited at the journey’s end with their Greek brethren, resulting in an anonymous (semi) permanent monument to the odyssey.

In the basement of Werkplaats Typografie there is a box. The box is the source of a very loud noise. The noise of fans, and of the electric systems inside it. It’s a sustained note, a continual vibration, a perpetual clash between the small metal components. No rhythm, no melody, an endless drone, through every day and night since the beginning of the Master Program, 12 years ago.

The sound of the server – located in the Werkplaats Typografie basement – was modified by the participants, using one mixer and four pedal effects, and sent through three black cables all over the school where three speakers where playing it very loud, during the work-study afternoon.

To commemorate the anniversary of death of Malcolm McLaren, the WT library is transformed into a bar. The idea for this event was taken from one of the points of the so-called “McLaren Manifesto” regarding reclaiming public space: “Parks, squares, churches and the Thames should be open night and day. We should introduce bars in public libraries; drink a glass of Guinness while reading Dickens.” This was one of many points in an article called “My Vision for London” which McLaren published in the New Statesman in 1999 and which lead to speculations that he might stand to be elected as Mayor of London.

Existing furniture from the library, in particular upside down bookshelves, are used to create a bar setting. During a “happy hour” drinks are served in the library and Dick Dick Dick performs and records their first and last live mp3 album “The Emancipation of the Voice”.

In april 1987 Jeffrey A. VanderClute wrote ‚"Metal Meltdown needs you!". In april 2011, Werkplaats Typografie answered.
To coincide with the 24th anniversary of Volume I of Metal Meltdown, a gathering was organised in the basement of Werkplaats Typografie on 15th-16th April in which one could experience the world of Metal Meltdown and that of its editor and creator, Jeffrey A. VanderClute. The aim was to attempt to make a contribution, either individually or collectively which could be considered for inclusion in Metal Meltdown. These contributions were sent to the P.O. BOX mentioned in the magazine. Surprisingly enough, VanderClute replied.

Please click here and here to read the letter to Jeffrey and read here and here what he replied.

Speelplaats #9 Q = A deals with the ambivalence of words and functions. On Fourthday #13 the Speelplaats room was turned into a vertical cinema by screening the movies Bauhaus Design workshops (1944) by László Moholy-Nagy, En rachâchant (1982) by Danièle Huillet & Jean-Marie Straub and Tell me by Guy de Cointet (2006) to the ceiling.

László Moholy-Nagy’s documentary of the Bauhaus workshops underlines the sensibility of how to work with different materials can be seen as an essential ability for every designer. Experimenting with material can be a source for an outcome in every field of design, depending on how the designer translates the form.

In the movie En rachâchant schoolboy Ernesto refuses to follow his teachers methods, he has his own way of learning which he calls “rachâcher”.

How we name what we see is influenced by our common knowledge, education, perception or personal story. A butterfly framed on the wall can be a trophy, a collectors item, a crime, a memory.

The participants of Werkplaats Typografie were asked to create objects of which the use, meaning or materiality had to be changed. On Fifthday #15 we spent a day at the workshops of ArtEZ, finding out about the facilities, possibilities and materials this place offers.

The objects were completed, presented and performed on Seventhday #21 at the Werkplaats Typografie Beginning of theYear Show 2011. Each participant was presenting another participants object while the speaker was reading the instructions written by its maker. Since the user did not know about the use of the object beforehand, he had to interpret and present it spontaneously.

The performance was captured on a movie, which was screened the day after at the same time in the same location onto to the ceiling, to end as it began.

A man sets himself on fire, on a square, in a city. A Burning Man isn't looking for the motive, but looks beyond the action. What is the meaning of a statement that can't be claimed? A Burning Man zooms in on the true effects of an act which advertising slogans and marketing strategies don't have a grip on. This production is a collaboration with Jesse Cremers, Simon Allemeersch and Philippe Flachet.

A festive kickoff of the new cultural season. The last weekend of August culture devotees can enjoy free musical acts and performances spread over the city of Antwerp. More than 200 cultural institutions and associations gather at different squares and present their program for the next season. The 2011 edition's theme was 'Art and Ecology'.

Indian Camp by Ernest Hemingway is an installation consisting of 4 synchronized inkjet printers that re-enacts the eponymous short story. The story is about a trip to a so-called Indian Camp by a medical doctor, his son, and his uncle, in order to help an indigenous woman to give birth to her child. During the process - a Caesarian incision has to be made in order to save the mother and her child - the husband commits suicide. Three printers represent the individual characters and perform (i.e. print) the dialogues between father, son, and uncle, while one takes on the role of the narrator. The story is thus not only spatialized but also transformed and performed in real-time, as the print performance includes the time gaps contained in the original story. This installation was presented during the end of year show of the Piet Zwart Institute's Networked Media department at Roodkapje in Rotterdam. The story was 'performed' once per day, over a span of 4 hours.

= The Beginning of the Year Show. On February 15th, Speelplaats (Firstday 1, 00:00:00) began with the End of the Year speech. Logically the last day now ends with the Beginning of the Year. All the contributions to the program during July 8, 9 and 10 are dedicated to the Beginning and the Ending, the maxing out of time, extension of space, and all the contributions follow the spirit of Speelplaats, as a testing ground for research, a place where the students can introduce and expand their investigations collectively.

When the digesting man is hungry, he must eat. When he's full, he must shit. After that he obviously is hungry again. He's unceasingly caught in this cycle. Need supervises this process and is simultaneously the foundation of it. The digesting man can satisfy this need for a short period of time but finds himself quickly re-absorbed in an unstoppable, alternating centrifugal and centripetal process. This pressure in or from the body, originated in a place beyond signification, causes him to be almost never at ease.

This drive which seeks to bring that what is inside to the outside, and that what is outside to the inside, accompanies the digesting man day in and day out. His quest for relief drives him to providential spaces where 'Sinnestrieb' (the sensuous drive) and 'Formtrieb' (the formal drive) merge into the spiritual and physical creative urge which defines man as man. The more he absorbs of the world, the more opportunities he develops in himself. The more he digests the matter, the more he can make form of it. Was it this what Friedrich Schiller, probably not coincidentally philosopher of the Enlightenment, meant by beauty in his 'Letters on the aesthetic education of man'?

With the pants at the ankles, everyone is equal. Especially in Europe. This is at least assumed. The trinity eye-mouth-anus pushes the digesting man away from places where he exists as part of a specific order to locations which are established in the spirit of mutual equality. Here he can lose himself into active contemplation and contemplative activity. Arriving at the crossroads of exposure the digesting man leaves behind himself and simultaneously opens up a new world underneath him. Isn't this the educational space par excellence? A place where, like the meaning of the Latin 'e-ducere' already suggests, one 'leads and is being led outside'. Thus the digesting human is longing for intimate experience-spaces where he can reveal and hide himself, behind entrance gates which are simultaneously exit doors.

In the ultimate educational space, to which the nest below is a cautious approach, the result of individual human creative urge is reflected in the book shelf. The outcomes of what is high-tech and at the same time intellectual digestion are leaning against one another, disorganized and uncategorized. Collective food for thought which carved its way through the cracks and slots of devices such as scanners, copiers, printers and computers, is piling up and generously offers itself to be consumed. Consequently the reproductions of various books, magazines, CDs, DVDs, etc. reveal itself in the form of both excrement as a nutrient. Isn't this a fine illustration of this coercive and perpetual cycle wherein man is being caught?

When he is hungry, he must eat. When he's full, he must shit. After that he obviously is hungry again.

Always beginning and ending at the same time.

Facsimile and Speelplaats-related books, cd's and dvd's in a custom made shelf
thanks to Paul Elliman

Each year Werkplaats Typografie organises its own Best Book selection. Every participant chooses a book that is important for him in that year. The project is supervised by a guest tutor. This year artist Joelle Tuerlinckx directed a series of acts in which the participants became their most signicant book.

Beginning in the Werkplaats Typografie library, the ensemble relocated to Netwerk Aalst in Belgium, gradually utilising costume, props, light and sound to create a theatre of the best books. Despite being amateur thespians, the theatre was a serious attempt to assume a character based on the interpretation of a book. Perhaps one can be lead to a new reading of each signicant book, an experience that is both insightful and bewildering.

This fifth issue of RTRSRCH, edited by Jeroen Fabius and Sher Doruff, is a monographic assemblage of writings by eight contributors focusing on a single, unique choreographic work: Ave Nue. The idea of reappraisal, or 're-visioning' as Paxtons puts it, is a central thread running trough the contributions. Together they form a reappraissal, a re-seeing of what the piece presented in 1985.

Steve Paxton was Artist in Residence at de Theaterschool in 2009. Together with students of the School for New Dance Development (SNDO) and the Amsterdam Master of Choreography (AMCh) he worked on a re-visioning of his piece Ave Nue, which was originally performed in 1985.

A story about a tiny human being who's in danger of losing control. Suddenly he's more beastly than ever. Meanwhile all the animals around him are disappearing. The story of a man in a state of collapse. Animals Ago is a stage play by Bas Devos and Michiel Soete.

The Listener is a multi-person chatting program. The conversations are mediated by a "third person", a computer script that adds, subtracts and replaces words to deliberately create discrepancies in what is shown, and understood by the users. Every chatter sees their own unaltered version of the transcript, but every other person sees a transformed version.

As these subtle changes are secretly operated on a secure server, a large plotter instantly prints out the complete transcript with both original and altered versions, shedding light on the inner workings steering The Listener's behavior and creating an eternal, physical artifact to embody these fragile, ephemeral variations. This project is a collaboration with Laurier Rochon.

€SPACE is a Brussels based spatial planning and design studio which also provides process management, stakeholder management and evaluation of complex projects.

€SPACE's ambition is to facilitate complex spatial and infrastructure projects by a balanced and integrated method of design, process and project evaluation, stakeholder management and legal counseling.

This spoon-flute was made in the workshop of Vincent De Rijk together with Stefano Faoro. It was used as cutlery for a big dinner in Rotterdam. Afterwards the instrument was played by Y. Tsakiridis and myself while performing with L. Vanhamel (voice) and M. Nelis (whipped cream guitar) as The Crappy Birthdays in Zaal België, Hasselt.

During the workweek of A Group Show W. Wolkman (now called O. Ibsen) spent his days and nights non-stop in the exhibition space.
He decided to personally register all the relational movements of the artworks, artists and curators during this period of time. The main challenge was to capture and record this temporary spatial dialogue as objectively and precisely as possible. The result of this self-imposed assignment was translated into a series of plain data. Afterwards this wave of information was represented in an accurate and meaningful info-graphic. What is visible now is a transcript that strives to expose the relationship between the parts, starting from the whole. Thus it provides the fleeting specter called Encounter with a discernible face. The accompanying book is wrapped with the aforementioned info-graph and its associated picture sheets.

Sticker design for Vom Grill. The 7 inch includes music from Vom Grill, Spykes, Warning Sign and Faceneck. Released by Jef Cuypers. These graphics were turned into a working font with 2 variations. The typeface, conceived as a building-set, comes with a manual which was first produced for the NY Art Book Fair 2010.

The exhibition A Group Show focuses on an alternative approach to the photographic object. It emphasizes the way images are being incorporated by artists, and how photography is used in an (often associative) game of construction and deconstruction of the medium itself. The exposition wishes to accentuate the material and spatial features of the image instead of its representational values. It brings together people with an investigating attitude towards the medium photography and creates a context in which there is plenty of room for discussion and experiment.

A Group Show should be seen as a temporary working environment, in which curators and artists discuss about the notion of space. The artists are being invited, starting from their autonomous work, to engage in the realization of the exposition and to participate in a dialogue on how to construct a meaningful whole.

A Group Show is curated by RE: and is a production of vzw Punctum that took take place, September 2010, in croxhapox, a multidisciplinary and experimental art house and an open working place for contemporary art, situated in Ghent.

A5 flyers and B2 posters, the posters were made by using stickers of which the left-overs became the flyers for the show

This is the setup in which Jommeke Geeraerts audioprinter could have performed his adaptation of the popcorn song at the Ultra Eczema's Popcorn Night(mare). The audioprinter is able to print out every desired music score with astonishing precision.

A La Karte is an alternative enquiry by Ladda commissioned by the city of Antwerp and Mas (Museum aan de Stroom). The museum wanted to know how young people relate to 'history', in which way they like to visit museums, how they want to be addressed, etc. Ladda went out dinner with 25 Antwerp adolescents and stroke up a conversation with them about taste, city, lifestyle, history, culture and museums.

book, 200 x 260 mm, 96 pp, iris print on the inside, the reader is invited to label the blank cover with the supplied stickers

Originally this poster was, as the actors wished, an 'enigmatic' A1 print for a stage play by theater zuidpool which appeared all over the city. At one point a newly recruited responsible for promotion and communication contacted me to explain that this poster was useless. It was too big to hang in the usual spots and essential information was lacking. The solution that arose was simple: I cut all the posters in half and screenprinted the missing information on the remaining sheets.

This paper is a documentation of events that happened during the 'Ondernemingsweek'. Mijnheer Cremers, Stagiair Devos, Mevrouw Niks and Mijnheer Van den Eynden teamed up with each other from Monday 2 March till Friday 7 March in the basement of Designcentrum De Winkelhaak in Antwerp. A week earlier the infrastructure of their work environment was constructed from found and recycled material. This paper presents on the basis of 14 keywords the workings and the underlying philosophy of De Onderneming. 'Zelfs een splinter is een kleine balk.'

Zonnenman and his friend Hart Voor Elkaar show us around in 't Land van Regels. Rules exist to make the work force shine! Indeed they create a space where everyone can develop themselves under the best circumstances. 'Niet vergeten uit te schakelen na het omschakelen!'

Artist publication made during the Ondernemingsweek, A4 booklet, 36 pgs

This book with ISBN number 978-90-813-7180-3 was printed in December 2008 in an edition of 500. To this day there are still around 408 copies left. It therefore seemed a good idea to transform this amount of slowly dying pages into festive waste paper par excellence, i.e. confetti. I am pleased that the book eventually, in this new form, will contribute to the success of a variety of parties. I imagine vividly the exulting birthday kid, the dancing newly weds or the cheering and sobbing jubilee-couple, all covered in colorful pieces of magical paper. Celebrate and shout because eventually everything has its destination!